This week on perl5-porters (15-21 July 2002)

This week on perl5-porters (15-21 July 2002)
   OK, you know already *the* big news of the week, don't you ? This report
   will tell you what happened behind the scenes of the 5.8.0 final
   releasing.

Module upgrades
   Russ Allbery released new versions of "Term::ANSIColor" (1.05) and of
   "podlators" (1.23), with documentation changes only, which were promptly
   assimilated.

..pmc files
   Nick Ing-Simmons found an old, unused feature that was deeply burried
   into the perl code : when loading a module via "use" or "require", perl
   checks whether there's a ".pmc" file along the ".pm" file, and newer; if
   it finds it, it gets loaded in place of the ".pm". This was intended to
   be used by the byteloader, but apparently isn't used at all (unless
   something was missed.) Anyway it was too late to remove it.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg00555.html

Working on the bug database
   The perlbug database has switched from the old perlbug system to a new
   system running Request Tracker (at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/). The new
   system will probably need a few weeks of tuning before it finds a stable
   state. It's worth nothing that bug ids (now known as ticket numbers)
   have changed -- the new system converting them internally.

   Many thanks to Robert Spier, Jesse Vincent, Robert Foley, and to
   everyone that works (and has worked) on implementing and improving the
   bug report system ! Quoting Jarkko, *it's a very thankless task*, and
   it's one of the key elements in successful software projects.

   Robert Spier and Ask Bjoern Hansen also built http://dev.perl.org/perl5/
   that now centralizes the Perl 5 development resources.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01019.html

Insure
   Aaron J Mackey built perl RC 3 with Insure (a tool to check memory
   access and leaks). As he summarized the results : *in short: not too
   bad*. Nevertheless, some of the points he uncovered will need some
   checking in the future.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg00840.html
   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg00905.html

A PerlIO bug
   Marcel Gruenauer found a new bug in the PerlIO system, related to
   stacking the "via" and the "scalar" layers. Apparently, something like

       open my $fh, ">:scalar:via(QuotedPrint)", \$x or die $!;

   didn't work as intended. This buglet was promptly fixed by Nick
   Ing-Simmons.

   Moreover Elizabeth Mattijsen found a workaround -- postponing the push
   of the "via" layer makes this example work :

       open( my $fh, ">", \$x );           # equivalent to ">:scalar"
       binmode( $fh,":via(QuotedPrint)" );

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg00864.html

PerlIO and MacPerl line endings
   Chris Nandor, maintainer of MacPerl, asked about the better way to add
   support for programs with MacOS-style end of lines : a straight
   modification of the tokenizer, or a ":mac" PerlIO layer ? Gurusamy
   Sarathy and Nick Ing-Simmons said that modifying the tokenizer is
   probably best done by using the source filter hook that is already in
   place. But Chris decided to work on a PerlIO-based solution, that will
   be in MacPerl 5.8.0 (and hopefully in Perl 5.8.1).

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg00871.html

About the maintenance releases
   Sarathy said that *there will be a 5.6.2 at some point, but I don't care
   to speculate on when. I foresee no urgency for a 5.6.2 if 5.8.0 turns
   out to be the high quality release all of us expect it to be.*

   Chip Salzenberg began to work on a new maintenance release of the 5.005
   branch, aimed at keeping it buildable with modern systems and compilers.
   Welcome back to Perl development, Chip !

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01065.html

The pumpking is dead, long live the pumpking !
   *I can see the light at the end of the tunnel... or is it the oncoming
   upset dragon?* -- Jarkko Hietaniemi

   Now that Perl 5.8.0 has been released, Jarkko will now be able to get
   some well-deserved vacation. Kudos to him for his unbelievable amount of
   work, his helpfulness, his competence, his professionalism, and his
   humor. Jarkko, this was a pleasure to work with you.

   The pumpking for the 5.9 development branch is Hugo van der Sanden, who
   says :

   *I'll be in San Diego for the next week, so don't expect anything much
   during that time. Please start thinking off-list about what should go
   into 5.9; the lists will be opened when I get back.*

Do hashes waste memory ?
   Chip Salzenberg, working on 5.005_04, discovered an apparent memory
   waste on hash buckets allocation. This suboptimal memory allocation is
   still present in perl 5.8.0, for perls built without "-Dusemymalloc" or
   without the C preprocessor symbol "STRANGE_MALLOC" (that you should
   define yourself, as it is never set by "Configure".)

   Chip suggested to build perl with "-DSTRANGE_MALLOC" when perl's malloc
   isn't used. Nick Clark ran a benchmark and this option doesn't seem to
   increase perl's speed ; but the memory usage should go down
   significantly in programs that use large hashes or lots of hashes.
   What's missing is a benchmark that outputs comprehensive memory stats.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01214.html

About the "sort" pragma
   Michael G Schwern pointed a small inaccuracy in the docs for the "sort"
   pragma. John P Linderman (expert in sorting), while trying to improve
   those docs, realized that the interface to this pragma was rather
   minimal and threw up a couple of new options in its import and unimport
   methods.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01176.html

defined or
   Brent Dax submitted a patch that adds the "//", "//=" and "err"
   operators to Perl 5. As you know if you've read the Apocalypses, these
   operators are borrowed from Perl 6. As Brent puts it in the doc part of
   his patch : "//" [...] is *exactly the same as "||", except that it
   tests the left hand side's definedness instead of its truth.*

   As this patch adds new ops, various tweaks are necessary to the rest of
   perl to make it work flawlessly ; Brent provided an assorted patch to
   "B::Deparse", and pointed out that the "Opcode" and "Safe" modules may
   need some work.

   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-07/msg01254.html

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